The Minnesota Effect | Stickman Themed | Whiteboard Style | Education

In 1944, Ancel Keys wanted to know what hunger actually does to a person. So he took 36 healthy young men, put them in a basement laboratory below a college football stadium, and halved their food for 6 months. Their pulses dropped into the 30s and their hearts physically shrank. That was the mild part. The Minnesota Starvation Experiment ran from 1944 to 1945 at the University of Minnesota. Every volunteer was a conscientious objector, drawn mostly from the Quaker and Mennonite churches. Men who would not carry a weapon but still wanted a way to serve. Over 400 applied. Keys kept 36. What Keys documented was not really about famine. It was about what a shortage of food does to a personality. Every one of those men was screened for mental illness before he walked in. That is what makes the results so hard to argue with. What this covers: Why Keys printed a brochure asking men to starve so that others could eat The 1,570 calorie ration, and exactly what was on the plate The cookbooks, the hoarded pots and pans, the 40 packs of gum a day Jay Garner sitting in restaurants watching strangers eat Franklin Watkins, the dreams about cannibalism, and the psychiatric ward Sam Legg, the axe, and what he said about it decades later Why the recovery phase turned out to be worse than the starvation 11,500 calories in a single day, and still no feeling of being full The 140 percent body fat rebound nobody had predicted What all of it says about the way weight loss gets sold now Keys went on to become one of the most influential nutrition scientists of the century. The Mediterranean diet is his legacy. The 1,385 pages he wrote about what a shortage of food does to a mind are not. The experiment ended in 1945. The conditions did not.